Scripture & Creation

Exodus 3:1-6

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.
Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush. “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Walking on Holy Ground

The story of Moses encountering the burning bush is also the story of the presence of God hidden within creation.

Moses is in the wilderness. He comes to Mount Horeb which is already called “the mountain of God.” An angel appears to him in a bush that is aflame with fire, yet the bush is not consumed. As Moses looks at this unusual fire, God calls to him from the burning bush. He tells Moses to stay where he is and to take off his sandals “for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Moses is then told that “I am the God of your father,” and the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. At this Moses becomes afraid and he hides his face.

In this experience, HE Metropolitan Kallistos Ware discerns three key considerations in reading this passage.

First, he says, this vision is personal. The burning bush acts as the locus of what begins as an impersonal encounter, but it becomes a personal meeting, a face-to-face dialogue between two subjects. God calls to Moses by name, and Moses responds. We are proceeding “through the creation to the Creator.” Moses, through the intermediary action of the tree, enters into communion with the living God.

Second, God not only appears to Moses, but He issues a practical command to him: “Remove the sandals from your feet.” Why does God issue this command?

According to the Greek fathers, such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa (+394), sandals or shoes, because they are made from the skins of dead animals, are lifeless, inert, “dead and earthly,” and so they symbolize the heaviness, weariness and mortality that assail our human nature as a result of the Fall. “Remove your sandals” is understood to signify a removal from yourself of the deadness of familiarity and boredom, and also a freeing of oneself from the lifelessness of the trivial, the mechanical, the repetitive. Thus it symbolizes the need to wake up, to open one’s eyes, to cleanse the doors of perception, and to look and see.

And third, what happens when in this manner the dead skins of boredom and triviality are striped away? At once we perceive the truth of God’s next word to Moses: “The place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When we are set free from spiritual deadness, we awaken from sleep and open our eyes, outwardly and inwardly. We then look upon the world in a different way. We experience the world and everything in it as vital and living, and we discover the truth of William Blake’s dictum, “Every thing that lives is Holy.”

With this we can enter the dimensions of sacred space and sacred time. We discern the great within the small, the extraordinary within the ordinary, “a world in a Grain of Sand, and Eternity in an hour,” to quote Blake. This place where I am, this tree, this animal, this person to whom I am speaking, this moment of time in which I am living: each is holy, each is unique and unrepeatable, and therefore each is infinite in value.

From this vision of Moses and the burning bush, we may find a precise and distinctive conception of the universe. Nature is revealed as sacred. The world is a sacrament of the divine presence, a means of communion with God. The environment consists not in dead matter, but in living relationships. From this visionary experience we are invited to step into a bright world where the entire cosmos is a vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of the divine power and glory:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.

Certainly there is nothing innately wrong in plucking blackberries. But as we enjoy the fruits of the earth, let us look beyond our own immediate gratifications, and discern the mystery of God in creation that surrounds us on every side. This is the deeper message of Moses and the burning bush.